Marketing encompasses a number of different activities such as product design, pricing, strategies, advertising and others. However these are just activities which have to be done in the process of marketing. There are also some crucial elements of marketing which are very necessary for the success of marketing and they form the backbone of marketing. There four elements are as follows.
1) Research – If you
want to launch your own company or a product what will you do? The first thing
that you will do will be market research. You will like to determine what the
market actually wants. Similarly, during marketing too, market research is
needed to determine what message should the company adopt and which
medium will be best, what positioning needs to be achieved to target
the right segment. By doing market research, we can gather data which can
help us in analysis and action.
2) Strategy –
Once you have your data ready, you know where your product stands and also
the standing of your company in the market in terms of strengths and
weaknesses. You also have an idea of what strategies will need to be
implemented and what factors will need to be adopted by the company
to beat competitors and succeed in the market. Thus, after research,
strategies decide the vision of the company, its goal, its mission and in
general where the company wants to be. The strategic plan needs to be
well thought of by realistically considering all possibilities.
3) Planning – Now
that you know, Where you want to be, naturally you have to
plan How you are going to reach there. That is the job of the
marketing planning department. The marketing plan involves sales
forecasting, financial planning, communications strategy and many such
benchmarks which define how the company is going to achieve its strategic goals
in the future. The planning department also keeps a track of the timeline so
that time to time we can determine whether we are on track with the strategic
plan or not.
4) Tactics – Where
planning happens at the topmost level, tactics are the street smart, short term
plans you implement to attract customers, beat your competitors, increase
sales, provide a better value for your customers or for any other short term
objective which needs to be achieved. Giving an offer such as “Buy 1, get 1
free” is a sales tactic. Lessening the price of your product during festival
time is a promotional tactic. Several such tactics can be implemented by the
company to make sure that it is inline with the planning done in the earlier
stage. Some industries, such as FMCG and consumer durable, mainly survive on
time to time tactics that the implement. Due to the competitive nature of these
industries, smart tactics ar absolutely necessary to achieve good revenues and
for customer acquisition.